A poem for Thursday

I always seem caught between rhythm and revolution. Wanting everything to change, loving things as they are. Connected to what I've built, fantasizing about changing my name and opting out. One of my exes used to always say, chin up Søren when I said things like this. He was trying to tell me it's not all either/or and big things can happen while small things stay the same. And small things can change that affect grand transformation, in the end. And change really is a wily fucker; the desire for it, the romanticization of it, the underestimation of it and the overestimation of it.

I think about it a lot. I mean, we're the transformation generation, right? Shedding weight and quitting cubicles, never too old to reinvent, life beginning at the end of every decade. And I think often about those women who seemed old to me when I was little. Who seemed old then but who really are old now, twenty or thirty years later. And I wonder were they really youthful when I was little, or was it a thing back then, to look and act older than you were. And not being able to perceive those changes in mothers and aunts and teachers compounds this illusion that we're the first to be so changeable.

Here's just an excerpt of poem by Mark Strand. You can read the full poem here.The Story of Our LivesIWe are reading the story of our liveswhich takes place in a room.The room looks out on a street.There is no one there,no sound of anything.The tress are heavy with leaves,the parked cars never move.We keep turning the pages, hoping for something,something like mercy or change,a black line that would bind usor keep us apart.The way it is, it would seemthe book of our lives is empty.The furniture in the room is never shifted,and the rugs become darker each timeour shadows pass over them.It is almost as if the room were the world.We sit beside each other on the couch,reading about the couch.We say it is ideal.It is ideal.